No Doubt There!

By coincidence the AIAS Co President Gareth Evans notified me this morning that a summer school on unified field theory was held in 2016 in which I was kindly described as the natural intellectual successor to Jean-Pierre Vigier. In a sense this is an accurate description because of the link between the B(3) field, for which I was nominated for a Nobel Prize according to the the Vigier Symposia Chairman Richard Amoroso, and photon mass, one of Vigier’s main interests. Vigier could be described as the intellectual leader of the Einstein / de Broglie School of Thought in quantum mechanics, a school which rejected the standard Copenhagen interpretation.”

Yes you are the natural successor to someone who, whatever his previous attainments, clearly ‘went peculiar’, like you, in later life and mixed with perpetual-motion and anti-gravity crackpots such as Thomas Valone and John Searl. You even have a permanent link to a Searl site on aias.us and have recommended several times that the UK government should invest in his levitating cancer-curing perpetual-motion machine. You have also noted that Valone is in Marquis (like most conniving cranks). Thomas Valone was a patent examiner until he attempted to misuse State Department property as a venue for a loony conference. One of us still has the envelope which contained an invitation to said conference. It displays a printed warning concerning the sizeable fine which can be levied for each misuse of such envelopes. Valone presumably owes the State Department a great deal of money. When the USPO tried to fire him, Valone used a ‘civil rights’ loophole and declared that his belief in perpetual-motion is a religion. He won the case! It is unclear whether he still works for the USPO. One would like to think that he was demoted to head pencil-sharpener. Here is Valone talking about his meeting Vigier and about the successes (LOL) concerning magnetic motors:

2 Responses to “No Doubt There!”

What scares and fascinates me in equal measure about the MRE affair is that it teaches us that policy makers really cannot tell the difference. That’s why the Vigier conferences, the Electric Universe crowd, the viXra loony bin etc. worry me much more than they would when taken just on their meager merits: to the typical humanities graduate who helps decide policy, these gatherings are indistinguishable from the real thing (and the crazies all seem to know each other, reinforcing the sense of an academic network). It also doesn’t help that genuinely accomplished people sometimes “go peculiar” as you put it. Roger Penrose comes to mind, and to a lesser extent, Crick, Pauling, even perhaps ‘t Hooft at his most speculative.

That is what ‘the book’ is all about, in the guise of being merely educational. In a sense, we were all misled by Martin Gardner: like the blind men in that allegory, he found what he thought were individual snakes, not realizing that they were the tails of a herd of aggressive elephants. At least the internet has had the effect of bringing them into the open. But the enemy is now seen to be truly frightening: not an invasion simple, but an invasion of the body-snatchers. The number of people with a foot in both camps is truly legion. Many members of the Natural Philosophy Alliance occupy influential posts in the real scientific world. When challenged, they say that one cannot (or must not) constrain philosophy [sic]. Well, most physicists, especially the experimentalists, hate philosophy (the Ph in PhD refers to the job-title which preceded ‘scientist’; not to philosophy per se). And ‘civilians’ really cannot tell the difference with regard to any of this: the participants at one loony conference were given an official reception by the mayor of the host town … and the conference itself was partially funded by the British Council (as a ‘cultural exchange’). One of the papers later presented concerned a gyroscopic antigravity drive! See, Ron is just one among the many ‘snakes’.